Today, transporting motor vehicles over long distances takes place very frequently, for instance between the place of manufacture and the place of sale, very often in two different countries or even on two different continents.
To ensure safe and economical transport, the use of standardized transport containers, also referred to as intermodal containers has become widely developed.
Such containers are indeed capable of transporting fragile goods such as motor vehicles economically over long distances while protecting them, in particular by sea or over land, whether on the road or on freight trains.
To be able to transport simultaneously the greatest possible number of vehicles and optimize the available space inside a standardized container, in a prior art, pallets were designed to fit out these containers and receive the motor vehicles to be transported.
Pallets like this, generally having two superimposed loading levels, thus offer the means of advantageously transporting safely four motor vehicles simultaneously instead of two, in a standardized 12 meter (40 foot) long container.
These pallets also make it easier to load the vehicles. Because the width of the standardized containers is only slightly greater than that of the motor vehicles to be transported, it is relatively tricky to load and unload the motor vehicles directly in the container without running the risk of damaging them.
Using these pallets, it is advantageously possible to load the vehicles onto the pallet while they are still outside the container. Then, when the motor vehicles are solidly fastened to the pallet, they can be loaded into the container using a handling machine, such as a forklift truck.
Generally, these pallets are designed to fold, by lowering the upper loading deck to take the least amount of space, when they are not in use, for instance during storage or when they are transported empty. Lowering the upper loading deck in this way also makes it easier to load the motor vehicle to be transported on it since the loading deck is only lifted to the raised transport position in a second stage.
Examples of such collapsible pallets with two loading decks are described, for instance, in the following prior documents: U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,567,111, 4,917,557, 5,213,458, WO 2015/040912 and WO 99/18308.
This disclosure also refers to a collapsible double-decker pallet intended for a similar application. However, the pallet according to the described embodiments consists of different means endowing it with many advantages over the pallets disclosed by the prior art.
The air freight transportation of motor vehicles in cargo planes has also grown. Because the dimensional constraints imposed by this particular means of transportation are different, the aforesaid standard containers used for transportation by sea, rail or road cannot be used for air transport, and specific airplane containers or airplane pallets had to be developed for this application.
The folding pallets in prior art were developed to be compatible with standard land or sea transport containers and cannot be used on said airplane pallets because once they are deployed and loaded, their shape and size are not suitable.
Due to the adjustable and adaptable configuration thereof, the pallet according to the described embodiments can optionally be used in a standard land or sea transport container, or on an airplane pallet. This change in configuration is advantageously done by a simple adjustment to the height of the top loading structure and the positioning of the vehicles transported, which is quick and easy.
The pallet according to the described embodiments is thus highly flexible in use and can advantageously be adjusted according to the different models and dimensions of the vehicles transported and to the different constraints of the used means of transportation, however the operator wishes.